How Our Virtual City Was Transformed From A Collective Into A Theme Park

This week, I’m thinking about that pure freedom you feel when you get to explore a city for the first time. It's one of those days where you just flew in, and there’s time to kill before you can check in, and it would be a shame to waste the sunshine. With the soles of our shoes (and the occasional assist from Google Maps), we get to see a city anew, with all the human connections that come with a modern metropolis.

The end result is that vague sense of joy and exploration you can feel in your chest, but that joy is the product of intricately designed systems—the speed and efficiency of a well-planned metro system, for example, or the zoning laws that let those quaint mom-and-pop shops thrive on Main Street in the first place. The joy of exploring is formless—the scaffolding that underpins that feeling is not.

That was the main thrust of my recent conversation with Andreessen-Horowitz’s crypto leader, Chris Dixon. It was not about physical cities but virtual ones: the internet as you use it today isn’t that far from the layout of a city. Just swap social networks for streets and websites for storefronts, and you’ve got the picture. Chris argues, however, that we’ve lost that joy of freedom and that sense of agency since the web exploded on the scene in the ‘90s.

“A lot of the 90s internet [was] these public networks,” Chris said on the Disrupt Yourself podcast. “An artist might make a website, a business might make a website, and you can do whatever you want, just like a city.”

“And you own a little plot of land like. I own cdixon.org, and that's my plot of land. If I have an audience, I truly own that audience. No one can insert an algorithm in between and take it away the way they can on a social network.”

But now, Chris says, our virtual city has become more like a theme park, owned and operated by the biggest players out there: Meta, Google, Instagram, and the list goes on. Our streets and stores are no longer free to explore, free to own and create.

“I like theme parks. They're fun. I don't think we'd want the world to be built that way, where a single company controls the entire experience end to end,” Chris said. “I worry that we've kind of lost a lot of what made the internet great.”

So, how do we take back our agency? A little buzzword you might have heard about: blockchain. Unfortunately, the solutions are not as concrete as we could hope for. As an innovative society, we’re still working our way through the kinks of what this disruptive technology means for our virtual streets.?

What I walked away with after talking with Chris is that the tech will rise to meet the moment, like it usually does. Blockchain is the brainchild of an unknown programmer who open-sourced their creation, after all. But we have to rise to the moment, too. Chris remembers that the early internet in the '90s was built on technology AND creativity. The first web gave folks the layout of our new city, but we filled it with our art, our recipes, and our hopes and dreams. The first step to taking back our virtual agency is remembering we have something more to offer the internet than just our latest trip to Cancun.

How do you want to carve out your own corner of the net – and what will you do with it?

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